Arab Modernities: Islamism, Nationalism, and Liberalism in the Post-Colonial Arab World

185 Pages·2009·0.913 MB·English

by  Jaafar Aksikas

Arab Modernities
POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Maria C. Zamora
General Editor

Vol. 1

PETER LANG
New York ! Washington, D.C./Baltimore ! Bern
Frankfurt am Main ! Berlin ! Brussels ! Vienna ! Oxford
Jaafar Aksikas

Arab Modernities

Islamism, Nationalism, and Liberalism
in the Post-Colonial Arab World

PETER LANG
New York ! Washington, D.C./Baltimore ! Bern
Frankfurt am Main ! Berlin ! Brussels ! Vienna ! Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aksikas, Jaafar.
Arab modernities: islamism, nationalism, and liberalism
in the post-colonial Arab world / Jaafar Aksikas.
p. cm. — (Postcolonial studies; v. 1)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Arab countries—Intellectual life. 2. Arab countries—Social conditions.
3. Islamic fundamentalism—Arab countries. 4. Arab nationalism.
5. Liberalism—Arab countries. 6. Postcolonialism—Arab countries. I. Title.
DS36.88.A418 909’.0974927083—dc22 2008050611
ISBN 978-1-4331-0534-0
ISSN 1942-6100

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Contents
Acknowledgments............................................................................vii
Introduction........................................................................................1
Chapter One. Periodizing Arab Modernities:
Toward a Political History of the Present....................................13
Chapter Two. Arab Liberalism: Abdallah
Laroui and the Politics of the End of History .............................33
Chapter Three. Tradition, Rationality, and Nationalism:
Al-Jabri’s Critique of the “Arab Mind”.........................................61
Chapter Four. Islamism and Modernity: Abdessalam
Yassine and Islamizing Modernity...............................................95
Chapter Five. Toward a New Project of Modernity:
Marxism and the Arab Left........................................................129
Conclusion.......................................................................................151
Select Bibliography.........................................................................157
Index................................................................................................173
Acknowledgments
I
n preparing this book, I have incurred great debts to numer-
ous people: family, friends, colleagues, teachers, and students.
I thank them all.
In particular, I would like to thank Jean-Paul Dumont, Paul
Smith, Elli Dumont, Dina Copelman, and Roger Lancaster. From
beginning to finish, they offered invaluable advice and criticism on
both the conceptualization of the project and the written text. They
provided a model of generosity, support, and rigor, which sus-
tained me both as an individual and a scholar.
Special thanks also go to all my colleagues in the Department
of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences, Columbia College
Chicago, for their constant support and encouragement. In par-
ticular, I thank Lisa Brock and Ann Gunkel, who were always in-
terested in discussing what was going on in the intellectual and
political arenas. Their patience and kindness, their knowledge and
intelligence are truly inspirational.
My life and work as a teacher and scholar have been shaped by
two committed teachers and intellectuals: Jean-Paul Dumont and
Paul Smith. Although I have moved in different directions, to dif-
ferent places, I still and will always look up to them.
I must also recognize the guidance and help afforded by the
editorial team at Peter Lang, and especially Caitlin Lavell, Jackie
Pavlovic, and Valerie Best, to mention just a few.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my wife Madiha and
my son Ayman. But for their love, generosity, and support, this
book would not have been possible.
For the flaws that remain, however, I am NOT responsible!
Introduction
[People] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the
past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare
on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in
revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has
never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they
anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow
from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new
scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed
language.
—Karl Marx (1852)
T
he present book is fundamentally a critical interrogation of
some of the ideologies of so-called modernity and moderni-
zation in the post-colonial Arab world, with a specific focus
on three political movements and ideologies: liberalism, national-
ism, and Islamism. However, this intervention is also best under-
stood as an attempt to grapple with what appears to be one of the
central paradoxes in post-colonial Arab societies (and Middle
Eastern societies more generally): the rise of Islamism and funda-
mentalist Islamist movements at a time when global neo-
liberalism has declared “the end of history.” Among other things, it
is an attempt to “name” contemporary Islamism and Arab nation-
alism and liberalism—to delineate the social, cultural, economic,
and political conditions under which they first emerged, evolved,
and ultimately failed, and thereby to construct a political history
of and shed light on Arab-Islamic societies at present.
For reasons, both theoretical and strategic, it seems only logi-
cal to start with an interrogation of the discourses of modernity
and modernization. The problematic of modernity and moderniza-
tion has been a central preoccupation of intellectual debates and
political discourses and practices for more than three hundred
2 •ARAB MODERNITIES•

years. The modernist ideology originated in the industrialized
North and has even a longer history there than in the so-called
underdeveloped South, where it is no less central. Ironically, in the
last few decades, the debate over modernity and modernization,
and in specific historical circumstances (namely colonialism and
the structural dependency produced by it), has been even more
heated in the “underdeveloped” South than in the more advanced
North, its place of origin. The industrialized North has become
“post-industrial”; it has left the era of modernity to fully embrace
“postmodernity.” But even in the North, while modernity has been
redefined, challenged, and even rejected as the dominant logic, it
has never been eliminated altogether. Far from it, the modernist
ideology seems to be regaining some of its long lost vigor and vital-
ity. Frederic Jameson, whose work is precisely a critique of
(post)modernity, devotes one of his most recent interventions, A
Singular Modernity, to the “return of the repressed” ideology of
modernity in the North. Here, Jameson grapples with what seems,
in his assessment, to be a recent universal attempt to revive mod-
ernity as a social ideal in traditional and political philosophy, as
well as in political economy and even aesthetics (1-3). While ac-
knowledging the possibility of a post-modern break, which could be
associated with a more or less “completed” form of industrial and
technological capitalist modernization (an advanced stage of capi-
talism), especially in the North, it is also important to recognize
the continued presence of modernity—in one form or another—in
our ideas and practices all over the world today. The ideology of
modernity, which is tied to a situation of “incomplete” moderniza-
tion, has equally been the focus of public discourses and practices,
especially in the underdeveloped South.
What exactly is modernity? How dare one ask what many
would consider a rather naïve question? Should not the modern be
self-evident? I will challenge this understanding by trying to ques-
tion what is supposedly self-evident and ask precisely: What is
modernity? The notion of modernity carries with it an inherent
contradiction. At a literal level, the word “modern” simply means
present-day or contemporary and can be dated back as far as the
fifth century AD (Jameson 17), when it was used to refer primarily
to a distinction between the present and the past, between the now
and then, between life now and life when Jesus Christ was still
alive. This pre-modern use of the word modern is turned to the
past, to that unique historical moment when Jesus Christ (in the
context of the dominantly Christian world) was alive. As an ideal,
•INTRODUCTION• 3

the past provides an example of wisdom, beauty, and glory that
needs to be revered and regained at the same time.
As a theoretical category, however, modernity cannot be de-
fined in relation to its literal meaning alone. Such conception is
very limited, and of very little use, for otherwise, any historical pe-
riod would be modern in its own day. In social and cultural analy-
sis, modernity is usually said to refer to the special features of the
industrial capitalist society that have been developing in the West
since the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, thus
steadily weakening and gradually replacing the more traditional
systems of thought and modes of experience and practice. It has
always been associated with such key social processes as rationali-
zation, secularization, urbanization, and industrialization and
with such ideals as freedom, happiness, democracy, and progress.
These characterizations, however, only complicate the concept
even further and raise more questions about the relationships of
the processes to the ideals and also of both of these to the material
world.
In late capitalist society, while modernist ideology exists as a
discursive formation and while it is central to major intellectual
debates and public discourses and practices all over the world,
modernity’s material referent does not in fact match the rhetoric,
or the formal narratives modernity relates about itself. The bour-
geois ideals of modernity—such as individual freedom, science,
progress, and democracy—cannot and will never fulfill themselves
in a society whose very structural existence is dependent on a fun-
damental form of social injustice, namely the division of labor and
class antagonism. Thus, capitalist modernity carries with it an in-
herent contradiction, a contradiction between its ideal discursive
promises and the inherently exclusionary tendencies of the capital-
ist mode of production. Even the essential quantitative changes of
social practices and systems cannot be explained by reference to
the emergence of these ideals alone. For example, the limited ac-
ceptance and incorporation of poor working class men and women
into the political system was not the product of formal discursive
modernity alone, but was primarily the result of hard and at times
violent struggles.
According to most conventional accounts, the notion of moder-
nity had its discursive origins and was given its decisive formula-
tion during the European Enlightenment of the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, mainly through the work of Vol-
taire, Montesquieu, Hume, and Diderot, although it was antici-